The big theme for this twentieth series was "the return of old
adversaries", obviously easier on the writers than the demands of a
consistent story arc like the Key to Time. The Tuesday-and-Wednesday
broadcast schedule continued, though these four-parters don't seem to
put any greater emphasis on the "wait for next week" second part
cliffhanger than on the other two.

Arc of Infinity

Return of the Time Lords! And the fanwank that inevitably seems to
follow. Yeah, the fans complained that the Temporal Grace introduced
in The Hand of Fear was no longer working in Earthshock. But there
are two ways of dealing with that: you can just ignore it, or you can
make a fuss about it. The problem with making a fuss about it is the
same as when we have talk about Romana and Leela: that while it's a
bone tossed to the long-term fans, it's boring or annoying for the
newcomers, because people are talking and taking up screen time but
not about anything that seems to be important. (Note how we don't get
a scene here explaining who Omega is, or why he's important – the
long-time fans can be relied on to go "ooh" merely at the name, and
the newcomers, well, why are the newcomers watching anyway? And even
for the long-term fans, this isn't the Omega who is the dark secret at
the heart of the Time Lords's civilisation; this is just yet another
cosmic menace.) In fact it's fair to argue that what the long-term
fans want is not an official answer to questions like that, but the
opportunity to argue about them.

John Nathan-Turner attempted to replicate the success of City of
Death by filming on location again, this time in Amsterdam. (The BBC
was using Amsterdam as one of the locations for
Triangle), a
soap opera set aboard a cross-channel ferry – its other connection to
Who is that Kate O'Mara was a lead in it – and was able to get
things somewhat on the cheap.) Quite apart from the usual outdoor
film-look, it doesn't seem to add anything; Amsterdam isn't full of
instantly-recognisable landmarks the way Paris has the Eiffel Tower,
and a barrow of tulips somehow feels more like a cliché than anything
in that earlier story. And for political reasons at the BBC there
couldn't be any drug smuggling, Dutch Old Masters, or anything else
that might actually justify the location in narrative terms.

In fact Johnny Byrne's second script for the show got loaded down with
all sorts of outside requirements: Amsterdam, Tegan's reintroduction,
and the return of Omega. Yet again he didn't get the chance to tell
his own story. Sure, the core plot makes no sense, but I'm not even
getting annoyed by that any more. Why does Omega have to bond with a
Time Lord? Why, if he's prevented from getting the Doctor, can't he
just do the same thing to another one, faster than they can be
executed? Who told Johnny Byrne how antimatter worked, and was he
playing a trick on him? (Being fair, that's keeping up a tradition
from The Three Doctors.)

I know it's hard to find young actors, but our two hitch-hikers here
are particularly gawmless even before one of them gets turned into a
hypnotised zombie. I suppose they're meant to be. They can't even
scream convincingly. And then there's that bird thing. Why is there
that bird thing? All right, the "Ergon". The show's had naff monsters
before, goodness knows, but usually the crew know they're naff and
don't make a big thing out of them.

While I've been a fan of introductory stories that show the life of
people before the monster turns up, this time the split persists all
the way through the first three episodes. All right, there's clearly
a connection visible to the viewer, from Colin to Omega to the
treacherous Time Lord, but it's pretty bloody tenuous. The only real
anchor we have in the Amsterdam segments is Entirely Coincidental
Tegan, which I suppose is a neat narrative trick (if I have to care
about somebody in this scene I suppose I'll care about her rather
than bug-eyed whatshisname)… but only if it works. The Gallifrey story
is dragged-out enough as it is without cutting away to monsters in the
mausoleum; by the time the traitor's revealed in part 3, I suspect
only a very slow child would have been in any doubt at all as to which
of the candidates it would be.

Meanwhile Nyssa's suddenly got more interesting, probably because
Sarah Sutton was known to be going to leave, so Byrne and other
scriptwriters for this series got asked to make her more mature as a
preparatory move. (Because obviously that couldn't be done to a
character who'd be around for a while.) She doesn't use any of her
particular abilities, but she does at least have stuff to do (helped
by being the only companion much of the time), and makes a fair fist
of it; she's definitely one of the brighter spots here. Davison's
decent as Omega, less good as the Doctor, and several of the guest
Time Lords are solid.

I worry slightly that I can trace the chain of reasoning: nuclear
fusion needs high temperatures and pressures, so a location with high
pressures gets you a head start, and Amsterdam being largely below sea
level has higher pressures than many cities. Well, ye-e-e-es, but.

And once everybody gets together and there's a chance for some real
action, what do we have? Running down corridors! All right, the
corridors are Dutch streets with trams and so on, but the number of
times our heroes lose track of Omega, only to be put back on his path
by a scream or other noise, gets quite silly; the double role for
Davison means we can't have a conventional chase scene with both
parties in the same shot. The childlike Omega distracted by a portable
organ is clearly meant to be a moment of pathos, but it's so utterly
out of kilter with his grand ambitions that for me it falls flat.
Yeah, I have no soul. Nice squibs, though!

Overall I find that this story has some lovely parts but they never
really mesh together to make for good television. Gallifrey's been
redecorated again, for even less of the collegiate feel and more of a
once-trendy café, and nobody except the High Council and the guards
seems to live there any more – but at last there's a Time Lady on the
High Council. The Matrix is now just a set of wibbly lines a bit like
the back-end of Castrovalva. Fixing this story would need a major
re-write, but removing Amsterdam completely would be a good start. In
the end it's just bland, extruded Who product, which offends not by
being terrible (that can be fun in itself) but by being inoffensive.
Still, it's not Time-Flight.

A side note is Colin Baker's first appearance on the show, as
Commander Maxil, in a high camp style that needs no assistance from
his ridiculous helmet plume.

Snakedance

After that brief glow of interest, Tegan's right back to being
annoying (though fortunately she gets possessed almost at once, and
once more Janet Fielding is vastly better in that mode), and Nyssa's
mostly back to being a nonentity. And of course we have a Brat. Brats
never go well on this show, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Kinda had been popular, and Christopher Bailey came back to write a
sequel (along with his mishmash of religious terms used as character
names).

The initial perils seem so trivial. Tegan is scared. She runs away
from a toy snake, and Nyssa can't manage to follow her. Someone takes
off her headphones. It's all tiny, and meanwhile the Doctor's ranting
about the end of the world (again). And then in part two Tegan's
playing silly games with the mirrors (and then the same again with
Lon); it feels like Omega and the organ again, a drawn-out sequence
that takes a long time to make a simple point. (And what on earth is
going on with the Punch and Judy show? Part four overran horribly,
contributing to its choppiness, but it never seems rushed, just
confused; couldn't some of the cut content have been put into part
three?)

There's obvious plot influence from Planet of the Spiders,
particularly the quick mystical training sequence. This is trying to
be a thoughtful story rather than an action fest, welcome enough in
principle, but the hastily-built sets and horrible guest acting rather
overshadow the direction that's very good but never quite energetic.
Brian Miller as Dugdale is a pale imitation of the dodgy carnies and
conmen we've seen before on the show.

It's interesting to see the really blatantly fake snake prop used in
the procession, after the unfortunate rubber job in Kinda; maybe
it's meant to make the "real" Mara look better by comparison.

It's still a bright spot in an otherwise disappointing series. Just
pretend the plot is too clever for you, rather than incoherently
written.

Mawdryn Undead

Apparently JN-T felt there was an annoying-young-brat-shaped hole in
the scripts after the departure of Adric: the liar and thief and
traitor were the things he found interesting about the character. Just
what we wanted.

His introduction was going to be in Space-Whale or Song of the
Space Whale, by Pat Mills and John Wagner, who were regular comics
writers (creators of 2000AD, and writers of the Doctor Who Monthly
comic strip). But Eric Saward as script editor raised enough
objections that it would clearly not be ready in time, and so Peter
Grimwade (an experienced director who'd written Time-Flight for
series 19) was asked to bring forward the unrelated story he was
developing for later in this series and work it into Turlough's
introduction.

He returned to his theme of using two time periods as the setting, but
was persuaded to put them closer together, so that at least one minor
character could be present in both times. The school setting comes
from the original plan to have the returning secondary character be
Ian Chesterton – but William Russell wasn't available, and nor was Ian
Marter, so Courtney was brought in. (Thus causing part of the UNIT
dating problem: this is merely sloppy script editing, presumably
spurred by a desire to use some red-and-blue bunting that was hanging
around from the Silver Jubilee.)

And the Black Guardian is supposed to be a master of evil, but shows
all his cards up front. Oh dear. Still, Valentine Dyall is always good
value even if his dialogue is crap. So's Mark Strickson, ditto, though
he's a bit too prone to bug-eyed mania.

All of a sudden the ladies are showing lots of cleavage. There's a
desperation measure if ever I saw one. Important design tip, though:
long skirts make for small mincing steps, which does not make your
alien menace look any more imposing. (And if you were clothed out of
the TARDIS's slop chest, why do your fellow aliens wear the same
garb?)

Just what is Turlough supposed to do to the Doctor? I mean, really,
a big rock to the head? A hugely powerful cosmic being, and that's the
best plan you can come up with? The Doctor's taken big rocks to the
head from better men than you.

Why do Tegan and Nyssa automatically assume that the person they've
found, who looks very little like the Doctor, is the Doctor?

I suppose someone wanted to respond to the complaint that when he was
a regular on the show the Brigadier never got to travel in the TARDIS.

Incidental music (by Paddy Kingsland as usual) is surprisingly
intrusive, wandering between a generic eighties action score and
wibbly synth themes. On the other hand, the set design for the alien
ship is baroque and lovely, except for the depressingly generic
laboratory.

This is a continuity-fan-pleaser all through: the Brig of course,
reversing the polarity of the neutron flow, the flashback sequence.
The main audience didn't consist of continuity fans as such; we cared
more about the quality of the story. What works for me is the lack of
a major villain: Mawdryn just wants to die (though one does wonder why
he couldn't simply crash his ship into a star), and the Black Guardian
is clearly pasted on and takes up most of the first half of the story.
Even so, once we get away from the prolonged introduction, this one's
surprisingly enjoyable.

Nothing even slightly undead, though.

Terminus

Squabble, squabble, bloody squabble. It almost makes me nostalgic for
Adric. Almost. (And the show's apparently trying to make me feel that
way too.) Stephen Gallagher had previously written Warrior's Gate
and his pitch for another story got lost in the shuffle of producers
and script editors until this point. Like another story set aboard a
spaceship, The Nightmare of Eden, filming was apparently fraught:
one of the six studio days was lost to industrial disputes, sets were
misplaced and under-lit, costumes may have been the wrong colour for
the chromakey (there's disagreement even now), and neither of the
robots had been tested before it was brought to the studio.

Oh no! It's a Paintbox effect! And Nyssa in a scoop-necked vest, and
later in her slip, which is all very well but not really very
science-fictional. (It seems she was originally meant to take off her
jacket because she was having trouble breathing, so that it would be
a clue for the Doctor, but the costume designer hadn't read the script
and so the only thing she could take off while remaining decent was
the skirt) The Garm is probably meant to be intimidating, but it's
shown too clearly in too much light and its voice is even sillier.
Roger Limb gives us Vangelis-style music this time, faintly
reminiscent of Peter Howell's score for The Leisure Hive.

I had completely forgotten the World's Least Practical Space Helmets.
No wonder they're in such a hurry to take them off (also they hadn't
been designed to be worn, and they fogged up something chronic). I
suppose they had to fit the Eighties Big Hair in somehow, but the eye
makeup is perhaps a bit much. It's a shame, after an effective
introduction, that Kari's primary job is to be a sounding-board for
the Doctor. (Especially when Tegan and Turlough are off in their own
story. Why not use them instead of the space pirates?)

Why doesn't Valgard, going into the "forbidden zone" where the
radiation is too strong, wear his radiation armour? Why, given two
paths back to the TARDIS, is it necessary to split up? Why doesn't the
useless pretty boy Olvir shoot Nyssa's manacles rather than trying to
pull them off by hand? (In the continuity in my head, he was only
brought along to be Kari's bit of fluff.) How does not jettisoning
the unstable fuel prevent the engine from exploding?

It's a very padded story, especially in the early episodes; there's
only really one plot thread where things are happening, and Tegan and
Turlough are stuck crawling along ducts as a substitute for running
along corridors. The final look on the Doctor's face, as he realises
Nyssa is really gone and he's stuck with the other two, seems to
mirror Davison's own feelings (he'd lobbied for the character to be
kept on). Nyssa's own exit is somewhat devalued when you remember that
it's pretty much the same "woman leaves to do a caring job" as
Romana's; was that all Gallagher had in him?

Enlightenment

"The Enlighteners" was originally pitched as a stand-alone story; the
Black and White Guardians were inserted when the story's place in the
series was decided. Barbara Clegg was the first female scriptwriter in
the programme's history.

Production was another nightmare (and another story set aboard a ship,
what coincidence) with EETPU strikes meaning that a choice had to be
made between this and the planned series finale, The Return; since
this concluded the "Black Guardian" arc, it got priority. Was it worth
it?

Cyril Luckham seems to have gone downhill since his cane chair and
flask of Green Stuff in The Ribos Operation. (And now he has a dead
bird on his head just like the Black Guardian. What is it with the
birds?) The first-episode revelation is fair enough, but it's not as
though being on a spaceship is particularly unusual for this series.
The brightly-coloured spacesuits are at least more practical than the
ones from Terminus, even if they are entirely pointless except for
the episode two cliffhanger (there's breathable atmosphere everywhere
on the ship, and anyone who went overboard would only be an
ephemeral).

The covert threat from Striker and especially Marriner is effectively
creepy (even if the Doctor utterly ignores any suggestion that Tegan
might have a problem with her mind-reading stalker), but the pantomime
Captain Wrack, while not appearing until part three, seems to have
come out of a completely different genre. And she's having far more
fun than anyone else in the entire story. (Which is wrong because the
whole point of the Eternals is that they don't have much fun, but
I'm glad somebody is enjoying the thing.)

How come it's perfectly OK to have the "vacuum shield" off when the
chamber door is open, but when it's closed the chamber is suddenly (if
protractedly) deadly? Except when it isn't?

I suppose Turlough's pleas for help from the Black Guardian, then
finally from the Doctor, are supposed to represent his ultimate change
of mind… except that he sticks firmly to his instant betrayal strategy
every time there's a slight setback. There's clearly meant to have
been a character arc here, but he was a liar and a thief before he
ever met the Black Guardian and we have no reason to suppose he won't
be afterwards (and the hammy acting doesn't help; Valentine Dyall is
seriously overdoing it too). Conversely, Janet Fielding's doing a
surprisingly good job here as Tegan comes to terms with her stalker;
there's a subtlety she hasn't often displayed on the show.

In the end the trilogy ends on a flat note, with the ultimate battle
between light and darkness reduced to a trite piece of moralising.
This story isn't offensively bad like Terminus, but there's very
little to it.

The King's Demons

Terence Dudley had written Four to Doomsday, Black Orchid and A
Girl's Best Friend. In spite of this he was brought back to wrap a
story over two metaplot constraints: the return of the Master (at
Nathan-Turner's insistence), and the introduction of Kamelion (ditto).
(Dudley brought in the shape-shifting idea, and the name, when the
promised ability of the robot frame to walk unsupported didn't seem to
be materialising.)

The Doctor is bizarrely unconcerned by what's happened to Turlough,
because if he made a fuss he'd short-circuit the plot. And the plot is
very tightly stretched even over these two episodes, given the dual
purposes it has to answer; I don't remember a story this dedicated to
things outside itself since The Rescue back in series 3.

It would have been nice if the Doctor had recognised the Master by his
swordplay (they duelled in The Sea Devils, after all). But this is a
very un-Master-like plot: it's much more in tune with the sort of
thing the Meddling Monk used to do. The Master was all about
conquest, not wrecking a minor historical event the importance of
which was blown out of proportion in later centuries. Ainley himself
seems bored with this small beer. (And nobody can be bothered actually
to fix the plot; they just run away. So the Master's still there, with
his TARDIS, and free to mess things up as much as he likes.)

On the other hand the guest cast is solid here, being made up of Real
Actors for a change, and they do their best to rescue a story that's a
bit of a mess. The costumes seem plausible, and the sets are mostly
decent (though a staircase that spirals the wrong way is unfortunate).

Kamelion's history is a bit of an embarrassment, but I'll come back to
that next series after its other story.

Like The Horns of Nimon, this was an unintended series-ender; The
Return was lost to industrial action and ended up being rewritten for
the next year as Resurrection of the Daleks. Instead, the filmed
ending leads very loosely into The Five Doctors. (And yes, I know
people often include it in series 20, but chronologically it was
broadcast much closer to 21 so I'll talk about it next time.)

Overall impressions

As last time, I've had a long break in between posts. I do still plan
to make it to the end, but the bright spots are getting increasingly
rare now. For the last series, once I got started, I was able to get
through about a story a day; this time I've been watching one story
and been unable to get up interest to start the next one.

Which more or less matches my recollection of the original broadcasts.
I was still watching because watching Doctor Who was a thing I did,
but I wasn't enjoying it; I may have missed some episodes here and
there, and not really cared about it.

I think I'd probably stopped reading Doctor Who Monthly by this
point. If I'd stuck with it I might have become a Big Name Fan,
written novels for Virgin, and been involved in the revival. Fates
escaped…

I wonder whether the apparent aimlessness of the series might have
been salvaged had The Return actually been brought in here, with the
Daleks in the ultimate "return of an old enemy" story. Probably not,
after this lot.

Davison, Fielding and Strickson all made it clear that they intended
to leave the programme during the next series. Yet again, it was time
for a complete cast change.

Nyssa

Nyssa should have been the perfect companion from my point of view, a
competent successor to Zoe and Romana, but she very rarely had
anything to do, and Sarah Sutton didn't give her much sparkle or vim.

It seems as though the progress of Nyssa has been all about stripping
her down, not just from her original mulberry velvet and tiara to the
vest and slip, but from a smart scientist to an interchangeable peril
monkey. It's only in some of the stories of this series, when she was
known to be leaving, that she was allowed to be a bit more interesting
again. But it's in the ones that were supposed to be dedicated to her,
Black Orchid and Terminus, that she's worst served; apparently the
production crew couldn't think of anything to do with a female
character other than put her in peril and make her scream.

And so the last pre-Davison character is gone. And everyone who'd
joined since her would be gone by next year. (And the console room
that had been in use since series 15 and The Invisible Enemy was
last seen in The King's Demons. In fact this series reminds me a lot
of the often-ghastly series 15.)

Favourite story of this series: Mawdryn Undead, I think. But my word,
it's not being much fun any more.

I don't think DWW/DWM/DWB was ever really worth it. The thing is, it turned from something which celebrated the programme in general and particularly its history (back when that was hard to know about if you hadn't been there) to a booster specifically of the new stuff (Nathan-Turner was coordinating publicity with it to build up enthusiasm, and in his style that meant knocking older material that might have been seen as competition) and a creator of fannish orthodoxy: once a particular story had come bottom of a poll, it was a Bad Story and you should laugh at it (even if you hadn't actually seen it). Back when I was reading it they didn't even have polls like that.

I think that it's possible to do better than simply ignoring gender (I'm very bored with the Stone Cold Combat Chick stereotype, who's basically a generic grunty male hero who happens to have breasts), but if one is working in a medium that's already very prone to stereotyping it's probably worth doing as a first step.

I'd also completely forgotten about Turlough as a companion. I can't have been paying much attention during this series, because I've remembered all the other companions from when I was watching. Or maybe he was just so forgettable?